A Light Industry Quality Control Engineer by qualification, Judit Kléri has spent 17 years of her career in human resources, and she has been working as the HR Director for Oázis Kertészeti Kft (the biggest Garden Center Group in the Hungarian market) for about a decade.
Judit Kléri completed the Agile HR training at KÜRT Academy last year and talked about this and internal communication on the training institute's blog.
In the interview, Judit Kléri also talks about the fact that "although it is a relatively small company, it is thanks to this that they are able to change quickly and make changes when necessary". All this, while the company is a second generation family business.
The HR professional added that "We had a lot of trouble last year with recruitment and retention due to a severe staffing shortage. Ten years ago Outlook froze up in a weekend with thousands of applications, but things are very different now. As employers, we now have to do much more to retain our valuable workforce".
"We launched our Blue Colibri platform last September, preceded by a 3-week teaser campaign," Judit Kléri pointed out in the interview. "Thanks to this, colleagues were eagerly waiting and interested, and the transition was completely smooth.
It's an easy-to-use, youthful tool that makes work much easier and allows for continuous interaction between staff working in 9 different locations.
I would also like to mention the Advent calendar project last December, which I was able to carry out thanks to this system. We managed to bring together and motivate almost half of our staff with this tool. They could participate in daily activities, like sending in Christmas tree selfies or a recipe, and win prizes.
I put in a lot of time and effort, but it all paid off when I saw how much my coworkers enjoyed the project.
In 3 months we had two thirds of our 120 employees actively using the app on a daily basis,
and we were very happy with that result. Last but not least, it demonstrated our agility, which is a particularly good feeling."
"For us it is very important to support the workers at Hungarian family businesses on a daily basis so that their companies can be as productive and competitive as possible!" - said the founder-CEO of Blue Colibri App.
As Tamás Barathi pointed out,
community building is important in any work environment, but especially in multi-site, dispersed organizations,
because employees like to connect and learn about one another's backgrounds, passions, and achievements, for which the Blue Colibri App is the perfect platform.
"I am delighted that Judit and Oázis Garden Centers were able to utilize the platform in its early months of availability to create an exemplary project that I think we will see in more companies in the future. But that's also what the Blue Colibri community is about: admins from different companies passing on tips and ideas to each other."
Across the country, customers can buy gardening supplies from 27 Oázis Garden Centers, 9 of which are run by second-generation family owners. In a broader sense, Judit Kléri is a one-person HR generalist in a company with 300 employees (all 27 Oázis Garden Centers, assisting all stores with recruitment and selection) and in a narrower sense, she is responsible for all HR related matters in an organization with 120 employees (the 9 Oázis stores owned by the founders).